Peter Beinart is…not as smart as he thinks he is

posted at 3:16 pm on June 1, 2006 by Bryan
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He has a new article in the WaPo accusing various Republicans of “hijacking Harry Truman.” He should pay more attention to the Kos Kids hijacking his own Democrat party, but never mind that. He instead makes a complicated argument about how Republicans aren’t living up to Truman’s legacy, therefore they shouldn’t invoke him as a standard:

Bush and Rice are correct that Truman saw tyranny as a threat to world peace and believed in resisting it, by means that included force. At West Point, Bush quoted Truman’s famous declaration in his March 1947 speech proposing military aid to the besieged governments of Greece and Turkey: “It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

But there are other Truman classics that Bush conveniently overlooked. For instance: “We all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.” Truman did not believe merely in promoting democracy and peace; he believed that doing so required powerful international institutions, which could invest American power with the credibility that the Soviets lacked.

In the years immediately after World War II, the United States encased itself in a web of such bodies — from the United Nations and NATO to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization). And Truman was frank in recognizing that such institutions gave weaker countries an influence over American actions. As the historian John Lewis Gaddis has written, “It was not that the Americans lacked the capacity to force their allies into line . . . [but] what is surprising is how rarely this happened; how much effort the United States put into persuading — quite often deferring to — its NATO partners.”

Bush, by contrast, more than any president in recent history, has sought to liberate the United States from international treaties and institutions — from the Kyoto global warming treaty to the International Criminal Court to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Taking those last points first, even Clinton and the Congress at the time Kyoto was first foisted on the world didn’t pass it and didn’t sign it. They buried it. Bush has merely continued and finalized that decision, and many European leaders have since recognized that Kyoto is awful. Beinart knows that; in glossing over these facts he’s being disingenous. And if Beinart thinks it’s a good idea to subject US military personnel to the whims of judges in Brussels, he should make that argument in promoting the ICC. He doesn’t make that argument, though, mostly because he is smart enough to know it’s a loser.

As for why Bush et al recall Truman’s staunch defense of democracy, it’s nowhere near as complicated as Beinart the Rhodes Scholar seems to think it is. Bush’s call to Truman is nothing more or less than a reminder to all Americans that national defense was once one of the few issues upon which all serious Americans could more or less agree. National defense was the one area where politics once stopped at the water’s edge. Bush is enlisting Truman to remind Democrats that they weren’t always so reflexively anti-American.

That, sadly, is no longer the case. And Peter Beinart’s dishonest and needlessly complicated explanations demonstrate why: Even among liberals who consider themselves serious thinkers, there is precious little actual serious thought going on. There is little in the way of principle among today’s Democrats, save one overriding prime directive: Stop the Republicans. That is the only war they understand, and indeed the only war they are actually willing to fight.

Update: A reader writes:

It never really occurs to [Beinart] in this article that the very international institutions Truman surrounded himself with were subverted by our enemies and ceased to function to our advantage. The UN Security Council in Truman’s day was very pro-US and a seat was held by Nationalist China instead of Red China. The comprehensive Test Ban treaty doesn’t stop countries like India and China from testing; it stops our stable allies from testing.

And Truman was wrong about economic development in the third world. We’ve thrown billions at 3rd world poverty, and felt great about it, and it hasn’t ennobled or enlightened people at all. You might as well pour all
that money down the drain because so much of it ends up in the Assistant Deputy Minister of the Treasury’s numbered Swiss account. And even if it was effective at treating poverty, there have been all sorts of studies
that show poverty does not cause Islamic terrorism.

Bush knows much of Truman’s wisdom was flawed, but sorted through his legacy and found the one true part and used it. Beinart thinks we’re still living in 1947. Who’s the progressive here?

Well said. And besides all of that, why should a Democrat even expect a Republican to try and live up to a Democrat’s legacy? Beinart is overthinking this whole thing and, as liberals are wont to do, bending facts to his own preconceived notions of what they should say instead of what they actually say. But on the bright side, he got a WaPo byline out of it.

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